Mobile computing devices, such as notebook PCs, smart phones, and tablet computing devices, are now common tools used for producing, analyzing, communicating, and consuming data in both business and personal life. Consumers continue to embrace a mobile digital lifestyle as the ease of access to digital information increases with high-speed wireless communications technologies becoming ubiquitous. Popular uses of mobile computing devices include displaying large amounts of high-resolution computer graphics information and video content, often wirelessly streamed to the device.
While these devices typically include a display screen, the preferred visual experience of a high-resolution, large format display cannot be easily replicated in such mobile devices because the physical size of such device is limited to promote mobility. Another drawback of the aforementioned device types is that the user interface is hands-dependent, typically requiring a user to enter data or make selections using a keyboard (physical or virtual) or touch-screen display.
As a result, consumers now seek a hands-free, high-quality, portable, color display solution to augment or replace their hands-dependent mobile devices. Such display solutions have practical size and weight limitations, which consequently limit available power resources (e.g., battery size). Given limited power resources, reducing the power consumption of the display increases the amount of time the display can operate on a single charge of the associated power resource.
For some types of display devices, operation requires a periodic ramp signal to be provided to pixel columns of the array. While the power requirements of a ramp signal generator may be dependent on many factors, often two major contributors are (i) the number of pixels in the display, and (ii) the frequency of the ramp signal. So for a display of a fixed size, the power requirements of the ramp signal generator, and consequently the associated display device, rely heavily on the ramp frequency.
State of the art display applications are driving a need for higher ramp signal frequencies, which, as described above, drive higher power requirements.